Workers at five McDonalds restaurants (in Crayford, Cambridge, Manchester, and two in Watford) will strike on Tuesday 1 May. Richard, a Bakers’ Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU) activist from Watford, spoke to Solidarity.

I first got involved through one of our organisers, Gareth. I’ve been a member of the union since before the September strike but we didn’t have the numbers in Watford at that point to ballot, but I attended the strike committee meeting in Crayford. I helped build up the campaign with workers from the other stores.

The main discussion at the Unison Health conference (16-18 April) was the current pay offer.

24 hours before delegates debated the issue, the ballot was sent out to members with a recommendation from the leadership for acceptance. After this undemocratic move the debate was fairly meaningless, but anyway, a 65:35 majority stuck with the position of the executive.

Cleaners, porters, security officers, receptionists, gardeners, post room and audio-visual staff at the University of London will strike on 25-26 April.

The workers, organised by the IWGB union, are employed by a range of outsourcing companies that have contracts with the university. They are fighting to be directly employed by the university and for parity of terms and conditions with currently directly-employed workers. Outsourced workers currently receive inferior pensions, and less holiday, sick, maternity and paternity pay.

Workers at London Luton Airport have given management notice of an imminent strike ballot in protest over a paltry pay offer, despite sky-high pay increases for the bosses and record passenger numbers.

The latest financial statements showed that Luton Airport’s directors’ remuneration increased 59% and the highest paid director received a pay increase of 48%.

Planned strikes by members of the University and College Union (UCU) in pre-1992 university, aimed to stop cuts to the University Superannuation Scheme for academic workers’ pensions, have been suspended after union members voted to accept an employers’ offer.

On 3 May UKIP and groups to its right are likely to face a well-deserved drubbing in the local elections.

UKIP will be standing in only a fraction of the seats they stood for in 2014, the last time most of the same council wards were up for election. In 2014 UKIP got 16% of the vote and won hundreds of new councillors. This time round UKIP’s support is likely to continue to drop, as it did in the 2017 general election, when it got under 2% of the vote. Since then they have been through two more leaders and have shown little sign of revival.

The Syriza election was a reflection of the hard, militant class struggle by the working class and neighbourhood community movements against the attacks of the “Black Block” Memorandum governments of the years 2010 to 2012.